A fear is a reaction to a specific danger, to which the individual can make a specific adjustment. But what characterizes anxiety is the feeling of diffuseness and uncertainty and the experience of helplessness toward the threat.

Rollo May
About This Quote

The need to feel in control of our lives can be so powerful that we may fear the loss of that control. If I lose my job, for example, I might feel that I am not in control of my own life. This feeling may come to the attention of others and cause me to begin treatment for anxiety disorder.

Source: The Meaning Of Anxiety

Some Similar Quotes
  1. There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first,... - John Lennon
  2. Of course I’ll hurt you. Of course you’ll hurt me. Of course we will hurt each other. But this is the very condition of existence. To become spring, means accepting the risk of winter. To become presence, means accepting the risk of absence. - Unknown
  3. We are all the pieces of what we remember. We hold in ourselves the hopes and fears of those who love us. As long as there is love and memory, there is no true loss. - Cassandra Clare
  4. Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ..each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add... - Tennessee Williams
  5. We, unaccustomed to courageexiles from delightlive coiled in shells of lonelinessuntil love leaves its high holy templeand comes into our sightto liberate us into life. Love arrivesand in its train come ecstasiesold memories of pleasureancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes... - Maya Angelou
More Quotes By Rollo May
  1. It is an ironic habit of human beings to run faster when they have lost their way.
  2. We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being....
  3. Intimacy requires courage because risk is inescapable. We cannot know at the outset how the relationship will affect us. Like a chemical mixture, if one of us is changed, both of us will be. Will we grow in self-actualization, or will it destroy us? The...
  4. Tenderness emerges from the fact that the two persons, longing, as all individuals do, to overcome the separateness and isolation to which we are all heir because we are individuals, can participate in a relationship that, for the moment, is not of two isolated selves...
  5. It is interesting to note how many of the great scientific discoveries begin as myths.
Related Topics